Carbon Footprint Estimation of A Medium-Sized
School in an Urban City
National Academy For Learning (NAFL), Bengaluru has been actively working to make the school carbon-neutral under the NAFL Green initiative. The present investigation conform the effort and presents the trajectory for understanding and estimating the carbon footprint of the school, and suggests potential solutions. It uses the GHG Protocol’s Corporate Standard, which categorizes emissions into three scopes based on their source. The study extensively explores each of the three scopes and emission offsets, and reports the carbon footprint of NAFL to be 107030kg CO2e. The major contributor to this is the third-party transportation facility, accounting for almost 75% of the emissions. The trees maintained by the school offset only 1.3% of the carbon dioxide emissions. This indicates that there still remains a huge scope for improvement in the carbon footprint, and so potential methods of reducing the footprint are suggested. Additionally, in order to allow for a similar estimation to be made by others, a python GUI programme is developed. The study concludes that the school needs to address its carbon footprint using the recommended solutions in this study. The study will also hopefully kindle similar studies that can collectively aid in a better understanding of the situation.